TextMate’s very useful “Find in Project” is super slow for any decent Ruby on Rails application. The problem turns out to be very simple. TextMate searches the entire project tree including the tmp and log directories. It takes a lot of time to dig through those directories — especially the log directory which can quickly become many megabytes in size. Not only that, rarely do we want “Find in Project” to return results from these directories. The solution is simple. (Continued…)

Reporting a meeting has to be one of the most boring assignments a reporter will ever have. It’s ironic because it’s also one of the most important jobs, too. City councils, school boards, state legislatures, congress all make decisions that affect our lives and spend our — the people’s — money. They make these decisions in meetings wrapped by agendas, filled with tedious procedure and painted in sermons of officialese. The reporter’s job is to distill these official riddles into plain English that everyone can understand. (Continued…)

My content management system uses Thoughbot’s Paperclip gem to attach photographs to the stories. Photos are uploaded first to the local server. Then the server will later upload the photographs to Amazon S3. The process is transparent and silent — too silent it turned out. (Continued…)

Dr. Michael Callister finished a quick — yet surprisingly painful — exam, he pushed back the wheeled stool, peered up at me over his glasses and said, “Dave, you have testicular cancer.” My worst fear was realized. It was only the Saturday before when I noticed a difference — one side was harder than the other. Now it was Thursday, September 3 and my life has changed. (Continued…)

I have two pet peeves about voicemail systems. Scratch that. I have about a hundred pet peeves but I just want to point out two. The first is why am I asked to press 1 for English and 2 for Spanish? (Continued…)

Banner advertising is a complete failure. It is a paradox of diminishing returns that traps a web publisher into treading water — never making progress and always struggling to stay afloat. What’s worse is how web publishers will flail around with bad idea after bad idea to get ahead. Yet these insane advertisements do more harm than good, cause readers to leave and sink the publisher even more. It’s time to end the madness and recognize that the banner advertising model itself is broken. (Continued…)

In the Safari 4 beta, the only way to add websites to the Top Sites page was to visit the website a bunch of times until it showed up or you edited a configuration file by hand. It was frustrating because I’d rather specify exactly what pages to show on Top Sites. I felt there had to be an easier way. With the final release of Safari 4, there is. Any website can be manually added to Top Sites. It’s quick and easy. (Continued…)

We use Thoughtbot’s Paperclip gem to attach images and other media to our Ruby on Rails models. When we save documents to a model object, we wanted to make sure the filenames were URL friendly — lowercase with only letters, numbers or hyphens. Paperclip’s processing chain makes it easy to insert this behavior before saving the file or running it through the thumbnail re-sizer. (Continued…)

For several years, Loy and I have worked under the company name of Apped Design. It was a cover name Loy came up with when we attended the first Mountain West Ruby Conference in 2007. The Neotribune was on the back burner and we were working on a couple of Ruby on Rails projects. We decided that it would be easier to go as independent consultants than try to explain a long, convoluted startup story no would be interested in anyway. (Continued…)

The newspaper industry is trying to build pay walls around their online content. The idea is that readers need to pay for content. This is a big problem because newspaper executives don’t understand how much their readers already pay to be online. In fact, they pay more than any newspaper subscription in history. (Continued…)

It started as a lark and grew into a passion. Something that consumed my mind day and night. After years of tinkering and testing we figured out how to do it — how to deliver the news, without the paper. (Continued…)

An ad by the Newspaper Association of America states that “No amount of effort from local bloggers, non-profit news entities or TV news sources could match the depth and breadth of newspaper-produced content.” Wow! That’s insulting. What’s worse, it completely misunderstands what’s happening to the newspaper industry and why the printed page is destined to fail. (Continued…)

A wonderful story about why we need to Save The Presses! I think the best one is “You can shed a tear right now for the iconic ransom note, with letters clipped from newspaper headlines. What’s a kidnapper to do? Print out letters at home using different fonts and point sizes?” (Continued…)

Managing email is a royal pain. Especially if you read email on more than one device. After buying iPhones last year, Mike and I worked up an excellent system of managing our email on the iPhone, computer and web. (Continued…)

Last year we did a project with substantial business logic requirements. The Rails testing framework saved us. We could create tests for all the different uses of the system and ensure that these rules were always followed. As wonderful as it was, there was a bitter aspect to Rails testing — fixtures. (Continued…)

There are several ways to set up a system for Ruby on Rails development. Leopard comes pre-installed with Ruby and Rails and is perfectly fine for most users. For me, however, I kept running into troubles. Trying to do a free standing install of graphic libraries (FreeImage or ImageMagick) proved too painful. I switched back to using MacPorts. (Continued…)

I was sightseeing around San Francisco one very rainy day. It was 1990 and I wanted a CD player. I was also broke. CD players were still rather expensive. So I’d been shopping around for a while. I knew the prices, but they were just barely out of my reach. So I was biding my time, checking every electronics store I saw.

That day, as I wandered around downtown, I found a small shop at the base of a skyscraper. It had a window front on the street with electronics from top to bottom. Inside, it was packed. I’ve never seen so many electronics in such a small space. It felt like a sardine can of circuits, chrome and black plastic.

I made my way over to the CD players and found the exact portable CD player I wanted to buy. (Continued…)

Having a current copy of your credit record is vital to protect yourself from credit errors and identity theft. And, thanks to Congress, getting a copy is extremely easy. By law, everyone is allowed to download an annual copy of their report. But be warned. The website advertised on TV, freecreditreport.com, is not the right place to go. It is a scam run by Experian to get people to sign up for an unnecessary yearly service. The correct website is annualcreditreport.com. (Continued…)

SWFUpload is a fantastic application which makes short work of a hard problem — how to upload multiple files to a website. Most solutions using Ruby on Rails revolve around multiple fields and complex ajax calls to monitor the upload progress. These are all hard to implement because they lack compatibility across browsers, require difficult server set up, and usually fail to update quick enough to give real upload progress feedback to the user. (Continued…)

In 1994 I took a Sharpie and wrote out the alphabet on my computer keyboard. Then I took little pieces of clear tape and carefully covered each key to keep from rubbing off the newly written letters. Why would I do this? Because my hands were starting to hurt and I needed a better way to type. Dvorak was the key. Not the columnist but the researcher who created the world’s greatest keyboard layout — August Dvorak. (Continued…)